The 2002 Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and Kings was controversial at the time. The controversy re-ignited years later with allegations made by disgraced former NBA ref, Tim Donaghy. A look back at the Lakers win over the Kings in the 2002 Western Conference Finals, one of the most controversial series in NBA history.
ArticlesFeaturedNBAOriginalsBy Arthur Weinstein on

NBA records show that the Los Angeles Lakers won Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals, defeating the Sacramento Kings, 106-102. There’s no asterisk attached to that game’s box score, but some people think there should be, and it should look like this: * Lakers assisted by referees making numerous suspicious calls and non-calls in the fourth quarter to help Los Angeles force Game 7.

Many fans, players, and media remain convinced that’s what really happened in Game 6.

Instead of an asterisk, we have allegations, speculation, a felon’s sworn statement, federal and NBA investigations, snide comments from players, and a debate that continues to this day.

Oh, there’s video of the game, and some of the referees’ calls look as suspicious today as they did at the time.

All those things are far more interesting than an asterisk, right? Here’s a look back at that game and why it remains a controversial topic almost a generation later.

Setting the stage

The Lakers were back-to-back defending NBA champions in the 2001-2002 season. They finished 58-24, tied with the San Antonio Spurs for second in the Western Conference (the Lakers lost the tiebreaker and were the No. 3 playoff seed). Los Angeles featured two future Hall of Famers in Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, talented role players (Derek Fisher, Rick Fox, and Robert Horry), and a future Hall of Fame coach in Phil Jackson.

Sacramento won 61 games, a franchise record that still stands. The Kings boasted seven players who averaged double-digits in scoring, led by Chris Webber (24.5 points per game), Peja Stojaković (21.2), and point guard Mike Bibby (13.7). Everyone assumed that the Western Conference Finals champ would go on to win the NBA championship.

The series was closely contested. Sacramento and Los Angeles split Games 4 and 5, each coming down to the final possession. The Kings led the Lakers 3-2, heading into Game 6 in LA. The two teams were tied at 75 after three quarters.

That’s when things got very strange.

Foul finish

The referees whistled the Kings for several questionable fouls in the fourth quarter. And they appeared to miss obvious fouls against the Lakers, most notably late in the game when Bryant elbowed Bibby in the face, sending him to the floor bleeding.


Los Angeles shot 27 free throws in that fourth quarter, making 21; the Kings stepped to the line 25 times the entire game. The Lakers scored 16 of their final 18 points at the free-throw line en route to victory. Los Angeles then won Game 7 in Sacramento to reach the NBA Finals, where they captured their third straight crown.

After Game 6, Sacramento head coach Rick Adelman didn’t hold back when asked about the fouls.

“Our big guys get 20 fouls tonight and Shaq gets four. You tell me how the game went. It’s just how it is,” Adelman said (via the LA Times). “They obviously got the game called the way they wanted to get it called.”

“We didn’t have a chance to win,” Webber told reporters. “We didn’t have a chance tonight … I’m not going to say what I really feel. I’ll get fined. I’ll keep my opinions to myself.”

Here’s a look at some of those questionable fourth-quarter plays.

The media jumped all over the suspicious nature of the fourth quarter. Stephen A. Smith, then with the Philadelphia Inquirer, immediately mentioned the prevailing speculation about a conspiracy, that the NBA wanted a Game 7 and the Lakers to advance to the NBA Finals to boost TV ratings.

“If there was ever a time for conspiracy theories to be given new life, that time is now,” Smith wrote, later noting, “Many things will be said if the Kings fall [in Game 7]. NBC will be a culprit, as will the NBA. Both will be accused of going Hollywood, which is hard to argue with right now.”

The Washington Post’s Michael Wilbon called the game a “rip-off,” writing, “The Kings and Lakers didn’t decide this series would be extended until Sunday; three referees did. … I wrote down in my notebook six calls that were stunningly incorrect, all against Sacramento, all in the fourth quarter.”

One can only imagine the reaction on social media if it had existed back then.


Serious allegations, questionable source

There were those who firmly believed the “NBA wanted Lakers to win” conspiracy. Yet for several years, most people regarded Game 6 at face value, as one of the most poorly officiated and controversial games in NBA history.

That all changed in 2008, when disgraced former NBA referee Tim Donaghy made startling allegations. Donaghy served 13 years as an NBA official before resigning in 2007 amid a gambling scandal. He later admitted to having bet on games he officiated, and served a stint in prison.

Before his 2008 sentencing, Donaghy’s attorney filed a sworn statement in U.S. District Court in New York. Given the questionable source, Donaghy’s statement probably deserves its own asterisk. In an account that studiously avoided naming names, the disgraced ref stated (via ESPN):

“Referees A, F and G were officiating a playoff series between Teams 5 and 6 in May of 2002. It was the sixth game of a seven-game series, and … Tim learned from Referee A that Referees A and F wanted to extend the series to seven games. Tim knew referees A and F to be ‘company men,’ always acting in the interest of the NBA, and that night, it was in the NBA’s interest to add another game to the series. Referees A and F heavily favored Team 6.”

That was enough to rocket the controversial game back into the headlines. Stern told reporters, “We welcome scrutiny here,” before trashing Donaghy as a “singing, cooperating witness,” and referring to him several times as a felon.

Kings center Scot Pollard, who fouled out of that Game 6 (in only 11 minutes), reacted to Donaghy’s claims by telling ESPN, “My first thought was: I knew it. I’m not going to say there was a conspiracy. I just think something wasn’t right. It was unfair. We didn’t have a chance to win that game.”

Lakers coach Phil Jackson fired back after Donaghy’s statement made headlines.

“Was that after the fifth game, after we had the game stolen away from us after a bad call out of bounds and gave the ball back to Sacramento, and they made a three-point shot?” Jackson told reporters. “There’s a lot of things going on in these games, and they’re suspicious, but I don’t want to throw it back to there.”

Lamell McMorris, head of the NBA referees union, issued a statement strongly denying any conspiracy.

“Frankly, we’re tired of Tim Donaghy’s cat-and-mouse games,” McMorris said (via ESPN).

Donaghy has doubled down on those allegations many times through the years, in interviews and in the 2009 book, Personal Foul: A First-Person Account of the Scandal That Rocked the NBA.

Official and unofficial investigations

Even people outside the sports world took notice of the game’s suspicious nature. Consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader contacted then-NBA Commissioner David Stern requesting an investigation.

“I spoke to him on the phone, and he was cordial but imperious,” Nader told NPR in 2008. “He never really investigated it. It was a whitewash.”

The NBA did conduct its own investigation into the game but didn’t launch it until 2008, after Donaghy’s allegations surfaced. The investigation, led by Lawrence B. Pedowitz, found the game was “poorly officiated.” The report cited 15 incorrect calls or non-calls in the entire game and the breakdown was even; eight favored the Lakers, compared to seven for the Kings. It found only three incorrect calls in the fourth quarter, two favoring the Lakers.

A 2008 ESPN report confirmed that federal investigators had interviewed at least two former NBA referees. They asked questions about Donaghy but seemed more interested in Dick Bavetta, the referee most prominently associated with Game 6 (Donaghy claimed in 2019 that Bavetta “was put on Game 6s to force Game 7s”).

“They wanted to know what I knew about Dick Bavetta … making sure this team wins, that team wins,” one referee said (via ESPN).

After Donaghy made his claims in 2008, Stern confirmed to reporters there had been federal investigations into the officiating in Game 6.

“[Donaghy is] rehashing a variety of things that have been given to the U.S. attorney and the FBI, fully investigated, and are baseless,” Stern said (via ESPN). “You can watch it, you can look at it again, and you could see what we call the correct, incorrect and non-call incorrect. … My guess is it won’t be pretty, but it won’t be dishonest and it won’t be illegal. Of that I assure you.”

Roland Beech, founder of 82games.com, a basketball analytics site that does deep dives into NBA games and players, actually accepted Stern’s challenge. He did a thorough breakdown of Game 6. Here are some of his findings:

  • By his standards, “73% of the officials’ decisions on calls and non-calls were either ‘yes’ or ‘probably’ the right call, and only nine plays (8% of all calls) were either ‘dubious’ or ‘very dubious.’”
  • The Lakers appeared to have a 7-2 edge on dubious calls in their favor, but “Five calls, though, across a full game does not immediately suggest any foul play at work.”
  • “As for the specific officials … no ref showed a particular overall bias in total calls.”

His conclusion: “Do I think the officiating hurt the Kings’ chances of winning this game? Yes. Do I think there was some nefarious scheme on the part of the refs to control the outcome? No.”

In 2014, Grantland published a comprehensive retrospective on that series, with quotes from many of the players, coaches, and other principals. Referee Ted Bernhardt, who worked the game with Bavetta and Bob Delaney, admitted the officiating crew “sucked”… well, two of them did, at least.

“Ed Rush, my boss at the time, called and asked what I thought about the game,” Bernhardt recalled. “I said, ‘I’d rather not say.’ He said, ‘Tell me, Ted.’ I said, ‘You know me, Ed. I’d rather not say.’ He goes, “Ted, tell me.” I said, ‘Well, I thought my partners sucked.’

“He says, ‘OK, thank you. That’s what I’d thought you think.’ Click. That’s why I hate talking about it, because I really care about Bob Delaney and Bavetta.”

Yet in that same Grantland article, both Delaney and Bernhardt defended that no-call involving Bryant and Bibby, the oft-cited most egregious ref decision in the game.

“I see Mike Bibby defending Kobe Bryant, and I see his arm wrapped around his waist, and to me it’s a hold,” Delaney said. “I’m processing in my mind to start to call that foul … While I’m processing that, then Kobe is trying to break free, comes up, the ball is inbounded and then a foul is taken. And it becomes [clear] to me that somehow Mike got hit in the face, and obviously it was when Kobe was pulling his arms up. All that in microseconds.”

“You could almost have a blocking call before what looks like an elbow to the face,” Bernhardt agreed.

Nader raised an interesting point in that 2008 NPR interview. Even if the referees weren’t specifically instructed to force a Game 7, they certainly knew that would help the NBA. Who knows what might have been going on in their minds?

“There doesn’t have to be a word passed,” Nader said. “If they’ve got referees who want to curry favor with their bosses and get promoted to officiate at more championship games, they can do it on their own. It’s a very tough subjective thing up to a point, a very difficult thing to referee. They have to make tough calls at lightning speed.”

Could the game really have been rigged?

Yes.

We’d like to think there’s no way the NBA — or any sports league — would orchestrate the outcome of an event, but all it takes is one or two bad actors to make that happen.

As the Donaghy situation showed, bad things have happened in the NBA. The recent Jontay Porter scandal, which saw the Toronto Raptors forward banned for life from the NBA for betting on games and sharing information with bettors, showed it can still happen today.

However, if something evil did happen in that Lakers-Kings game, proving it at this point would probably take a death-bed confession from someone involved. Wilbon thinks that if there had been a plan to fix the series, it definitely would have leaked by now.

“I don’t believe that David Stern called anybody or that my bosses at the network called anybody. I don’t believe any of that, because it would get out,” Wilbon told Grantland. “Nobody can keep their mouths shut. I just think that people have a bad night.”

Pollard, the Kings center who fouled out of that game, later went on to star in CBS’s hit show, Survivor. That show’s been accused of scripting the results (and Pollard fouled out, or got voted off, of that show, too). Pollard told the LA Times in 2008 that he hopes it never comes out that the game was scripted.

“If it was proven that it was … that would hurt the league,” Pollard said. “I don’t want it to be found out that that was true. I would much rather live with human error than human interference.”

We see terrible officiating all the time in sports. Without bad officials and questionable calls to complain about, social media would be a far less interesting space.


So terrible officiating happens. Believing that calls have been botched for the express purpose of affecting the outcome of a game or series is another thing entirely.

Yet more and more, fans and media are casting a wary eye at officiating that seems biased or suspect. ESPN’s talk-show host Smith, who mentioned the word “conspiracy” right after that Game 6, said recently on First Take that the boom in legalized gaming will make fans even more suspicious of bad calls.

“The sports gaming industry has a profound effect on the world of professional sports, particularly the NBA, when it comes to officiating,” Smith said. “Because since the additional money has become infused into the sport, we all know what that’s about. You want to make sure you dot I’s and cross T’s. You don’t want another Tim Donaghy situation.”


The elephant in the room

The official stance is that nothing “nefarious” happened in that game. Yet the fact many people question that has led to some interesting and awkward conversations.

Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke told Sports Illustrated he talked to Stern during the 2002 NBA Finals and asked him about the officiating in Game 6.

“He looked at me, pointed his finger and said, ‘If you’re going to write that there’s a conspiracy theory, then you better understand that you’re accusing us of committing a felony and if you put that in the paper you better have your facts straight,'” Plaschke recalls Stern saying. “So I just backed off, I didn’t have any facts, just what I saw, but he got very upset at me.”

TNT interviewed Webber before Game 7 of the 2016 Western Conference Finals (he was working as a TV analyst on that game). Shaq, of course, was sitting in the TNT studio. The two talked about that 2002 series for almost three minutes; incredibly, neither mentioned a hint of the controversy.

If players and media are sometimes reluctant to say the quiet part out loud, fans are more than willing to use the other “F” word: One YouTube video of that Webber interview has almost 575 comments, the overwhelming majority promoting the “fixed” theory. (Sample comments: “TNT/NBA held Webber hostage during this segment. … Webber looked like he had a gun to his head”).

Two years later, Webber appeared as an analyst on a TNT halftime show, sitting next to Shaq. The topic turned to that 2002 Western Conference finals, and O’Neal praised that Kings squad for making the Lakers work seven games to win the series.

“All it took was you and some dirty refs,” Webber joked to Shaq. “But we ain’t supposed to talk about that.”

Everyone on the panel laughed heartily for several seconds, tried to stop, then started laughing even harder.

“I’m trying to get fired,” Webber joked.

Bryant, the Lakers legend who died in 2020, addressed that series in a 2018 appearance on Bartstool Sports’ Pardon My Take podcast. Host Dan Katz cut right to the chase:

“2002 Western Conference Finals — was it rigged?”

“Well [Tim Donaghy] definitely had money on it, that’s a fact,” Bryant said. “So from that standpoint, yes. But from the Kings missing 20-something free throws in Game 7. Unless you go and check their bank accounts, I don’t know what to tell you.”

@pardonmytake Kobe Bryant Knows something Was up in the 2002 Western Conference finals with the refs #lakers #nba #basketball #barstoolsports ♬ original sound – pardonmytake


Why everyone really remembers that game

Bryant made an excellent point — the Kings played poorly in Game 7, hitting only two of their 20 three-point shots and making only 16-of-30 free throws before losing in overtime.

To a man, players from that Kings team acknowledge, regardless of what happened in Game 6, they should have put the Lakers away in the series finale in Sacramento.

Without question, that loss has magnified what happened in Game 6. Had the Kings won the series, Game 6 would be just a footnote. Instead, it has taken on an almost mythical significance.

Kurt Rambis, a popular former Lakers player who served as an assistant coach on that Los Angeles team, remembers how tight the Kings looked in Game 7.

“I just remember saying to Phil, ‘They’re afraid to shoot.’ Guys got open looks, they were not aggressive at this point in time, other than Bibby,” Rambis told Grantland.

Grant Napear, the Kings’ TV play-by-play announcer at that time, told NBC Sports Bay Area that the Kings have only themselves to blame for losing that series.

“As bad as (Game 6) was … they played all year to get home court advantage, missed 14 free throws in a Game 7. And I can’t blame that on Tim Donaghy or the refs or anyone else,” Napear said.

Still, Napear blasted the officiating in Game 6: “It was the worst officiated game in NBA history.”

So, maybe that should lead our hypothetical asterisk for Game 6: * The worst-officiated game in NBA history, which many people believe was rigged, possibly subconsciously, that has become a running joke with fans and players, and is remembered mainly because the Kings folded in Game 7.

Let’s shorten that to: * The worst-officiated game in NBA history. Almost everyone can agree with that. And if there’s more to the story, that might be as close to the truth as we ever get.

[Photo Credit: NBC]

About Arthur Weinstein

Arthur spends his free time traveling around the U.S. to sporting events, state and national parks, and in search of great restaurants off the beaten path.

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